FORUM

Introduction:
Reading and Teaching the Forum on Hawai‘i in World History

Christine Skwiot

Nineteenth-century
maps proclaiming Hawai‘i the "Crossroads of the Pacific" make clear that it was
a crossroads of the Atlantic as well. From the late eighteenth century, first
as a center of trade and labor recruitment for fur traders, then as a supplier
of sandalwood, and then as the winter port of the bulk of the world's whaling
fleet, Hawai‘i became a key node in the global capitalist economy, connecting
the Americas, Asia, and Europe. While some observers noted and still remark
that Hawai‘i is more distant from another body of land than any other place on
earth, thus asserting the isolation of Hawai‘i and Hawaiians from the world,
most indigenous and foreign peoples understood that the location of Hawai‘i
made it a key pivot-point upon which a growing volume of global trade in ideas,
institutions, and goods and of overseas migration could and soon did turn. Hawaiians
from all levels of society, as well as foreigners, actively and often eagerly
participated in the incorporation of Hawai‘i into global networks of trade and
migration and promoted the consolidation Hawai‘i into a centralized monarchy and
sovereign state recognized as a member of the emergent world family of nations.

The
cosmopolitanism, global engagements, and mobility of Hawaiians had historic
roots in the exploration, colonization, and settlement of the ocean that covers
one-third of the earth's surface. Approximately 4,000 ago, migrants from New
Guinea who had settled in the Bismarck Islands met a new group of intruders
with original roots in Formosa. By around 1350 B.C. they became the Lapita
people and soon embarked on the then most extensive and rapid migration and
settlement process in world history. They reached the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu,
and New Caledonia in a few hundred years, and then Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga not
long after 1000 B.C., where they began to become Polynesians. For nearly a
thousand years, expansion stopped. Then, improvements in canoe and sailing
technologies enabled the people some scholars call proto-Polynesians to migrate
to the Marquesas about 100 B.C; from the Marquesas, they colonized Hawai‘i and Rapa
Nui (Easter Island) between 300 and 700 A.D., and New Zealand by around 1200
A.D. Subsequently, explorers from Society Islands moved to and around Hawai‘i and
other Polynesian points for more than century before and a century after 1000 A.D.
These two waves of often two-way exploration, migration, and settlement each
lasted about two-hundred years.1

After
reaching what he called the Sandwich Islands in 1778, Captain James Cook
proclaimed the Hawaiian archipelago the northern edge of a vast nation. It
stretched "from New Zealand to the south, as far as the Sandwich Islands to the
north, and in another direction from Easter Island to the Hebrides: that is,
over an extent of sixty degrees of latitude, or twelve hundred leagues north
and south, and eighty-three degrees longitude, or sixteen hundred and sixty
leagues east and west!" Cook was awestruck: "How much farther in either
direction its colonies reach is not known; but what we know already...warrants
our pronouncing it to be...certainly by far the most extensive nation on
earth."2 Cook discerned the outlines of a history later generations of Euro-American
imperialists and imperial historians denied and labored to erase: Polynesians
were related to, and for much of their history, in sustained contact with one
another. The exploration and settlement of the Pacific Islands was the deliberate
undertaking of skilled nautical peoples who built and maintained networks of
trade, kinship, and marriage and of cultural, political, and religious exchange.

While
many islanders became isolated from one another before Westerners arrived in
the Pacific, their memories of themselves as a mobile and cosmopolitan oceanic
peoples endured. In his contribution to this forum, Kealani Cook stresses that
from the end of the voyaging period in Hawai‘i through the arrival of Captain
James Cook in 1778, Native Hawaiians sustained intellectual, spiritual, and
genealogical ties with the islands and islanders of southern Oceania and
understandings of themselves as sea-faring peoples through chant, legend, and
grand oral genealogical histories known as kū‘auhau.

The
best world history textbooks and monographs draw upon Hawaiian and Pacific scholarship
to interpret a long history of cross-cultural encounters and engagements
between Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders and Outlanders from both sides of
the beach, and at their finest, of reciprocal interactions and mutual transformations.
However, Pacific Islanders still more often appear rooted rather than mobile, more
historical actors than agents of historic change. As Nicholas Thomas observes,
"the 'both sides talk' [approach] tends to preserve the idea that on one of
these 'sides' we find indigenous communities, communities that are bounded,
firmly situated in place, and culturally coherent" and are "recipients of
'global' forces, meanings, and commodities, emanating largely from the West."3

The
four essays in this forum on Hawai‘i in world history focus on some key yet
very different ways the indigenous people of and later migrants, settlers, and
refugees in Hawai‘i harnessed global ideas, institutions, and networks to
pursue particular rights, ranging from the right of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i to sovereign
nation-statehood and membership in the world of nations in the nineteenth
century to civil, legal, and human rights under imperial and martial law in the
twentieth century. In the first two essays, Stacy Kamehiro and Kealani Cook
join Thomas in attending to the mobility of indigenous communities. They
analyze the ways Hawaiians harnessed Western nation-state ideas and practices
to indigenous nation-building projects and to trans-national and trans-regional
cultural and political engagements aimed at securing internal and international
respect for the sovereign statehood of the Kingdom. The second two essays, by Charles
Romney and Alan Rosenfeld, analyze the pursuit of legal rights in Hawai‘i,
respectively, by Asian migrant-settlers under U.S. territorial law at the
turn-of-the-twentieth century and by U.S. civilian internees under martial law
during World War II. Both authors situate Hawai‘i in comparative and world
historical frameworks, again respectively and particularly, the history of
imperial legal regimes and colonial intimacies, and the history of legal rights
and national and global security.

Starting
in the mid-nineteenth century, Western states organized and participated in world's
fairs and international expositions to showcase the agricultural, artistic, and
industrial progress of their nations and to display the exotic customs, cultures,
and peoples of non-white and colonial peoples. These fairs and expositions were
pageants of power and prestige, designed to stir the national pride and
patriotism of the citizens of Western nations and to celebrate the racial and
civilizational superiority of white nationals over non-white colonials. But the
history of world's fairs is more complicated and multi-directional, as Stacy
Kamehiro shows in her essay on the participation of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in nineteenth-century
world's fairs in Australia, Europe, and the United States. Hawaiian
participation in world's fairs, she argues, "provides a rare and remarkable
example of Native self-display." In showcasing Hawai‘i as a civilized and
modernizing indigenous nation, Hawaiian world's fair exhibits challenged
Western constructions of their people and nations as exotic and inferior others
incapable of or unfit for self-government. Like those of other nations, the
exhibits Hawai‘i sent abroad during the reigns of King Kamehameha V (Lota Kapuāiwa) and King David Kalākaua aimed at instilling national pride
and patriotism among the Native, Asian, and Euro-American citizens and settlers
of Hawai‘i and promoting a national and international appreciation for Hawaiian
agriculture, arts, history, and industry, and global recognition of and respect
for the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.

Collaborative
endeavors of the Hawaiian, Asian, and Euro-American (haole) citizens and
settlers of the Kingdom, world's fairs also became a site of contestation and
struggle between the agents and forces of anti-colonial Native nationalism, on
the one hand, and haole settlers and U.S. imperialism, on the other hand.
After haole stripped King Kalākaua of his power to rule by forcing
him to sign the Bayonet Constitution of 1887 and overthrew the sovereign
monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani, and the independent Kingdom of Hawai‘i in 1893, the
focus of Hawaiian exhibits at world's fairs shifted from displays of its long
and rich history and the indigenous modernization of a sovereign state. Annexationist haole instead represented Hawai‘i and Hawaiians as feminized and
racialized inferiors in need of U.S. imperial tutelage and rule.

Kealani
Cook also analyzes the internal and international goals of Native Hawaiian
nationalists in his history of King Kalākaua's Polynesian Confederacy.
Cook interprets the Polynesian Confederacy as an expression of the nascent
nineteenth-century understanding that colonialism was a global process and that
anti-colonial movements therefore had to be internationalist as well as
nationalist. In 1881, on the first round-the-world tour made by any reigning
monarch, Kalākaua made careful study of "self-strengthening" movements in
Asia. He unsuccessfully proposed to the Emperor of Japan the organization of a
confederacy of Asian and Pacific nations collectively committed to thwarting
Western imperial expansion in the region. These endeavors shaped
Kalākaua's Polynesian Confederacy, an idea, an organization, and a project
with three key goals. First, Hawaiian participation in international politics would
increase the global stature and standing of the Kingdom. Second, as an
enlightened Western-style nation and member of the international community of
states and as the most civilized and developed nation in Polynesia, Hawai‘i and
Hawaiians had the duty and the right to uplift Samoans and reshape Sāmoa
in the Hawaiian image. Third, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and its citizens also
endeavored to take the lead in building upon the genealogical and cultural ties
of Polynesians to promote their collective defense and mutual independence from
further Western colonial incursions in Oceania.

The
next two articles focus on situating the history of civil, legal, and human
rights in twentieth-century Hawai‘i in comparative and world history. In the
third essay, Charles Romney uses the petition for habeas corpus filed by Jung
Hung, a Chinese migrant-settler in Hawai‘i, as a lens onto the comparative
history of the colonial legal regimes of the United States, Britain, and
France. Seeking to marry Lee Chee Hing, the man she loved, Jung Hung sought
release from her involuntary service as a prostitute of Jue Grin, who claimed
that Jung Hung was not his prostitute but his wife. Romney analyzes the story
of Jung Hung, the court translator, and the judge's interpretation of printed
legal opinions and compares related petitions regarding domestic living
arrangements, domestic abuse, and marriage in colonial Hawai‘i with ostensibly similar
cases heard in the Transkei region of British South Africa, French West Africa,
the U.S. territory of Alaska, and elsewhere. Romney offers insights into the
often similar strategies different colonial peoples developed to gain access to
legal rights at the broad turn-of-the-twentieth century. In the cases of
marriage, domestic living arrangements, and domestic abuse examined here,
colonial peoples drew upon Western ideas about proper and civilized domestic
relationships to frame and advance their own legal claims. Court interpreters
served to translate across cultural and linguistic divides. In assessing the
merits of different cases, judges relied not just on the testimony of
individuals and interpreters but on trans-national and trans-imperial legal
print culture to make cross-colonial comparisons of the customs, laws, and
practices of different peoples and render judgments as to whether they were
"civilized" or "uncivilized." Cross-colonial comparisons provided a key
underpinning of and lent coherence to a global discourse of Euro-American
imperial law.

The
final essay by Alan Rosenfeld examines the U.S. federal government's imposition
of martial law on the Territory of Hawai‘i and the internment of over 17,000
foreign prisoners-of-war and U.S. civilians there during World War II.
Rosenfeld focuses on the experiences of more than 2,500 civilian internees,
mostly Japanese Americans but also German- and Italian-American civilians to
situate wartime Hawai‘i in comparative and global contexts. He rejects the idea
that wartime Hawai‘i offers "an uplifting counterpoint" to the massive
internment of Japanese Americans and other U.S. and foreign nationals on the
mainland. In Hawai‘i, the mainland U.S., and elsewhere, state-run camps made
religious, racial, and other minorities the targets of incarceration and the
denial of legal rights.

Rosenfeld
begins by comparing state-run wartime camps in Hawai‘i to those elsewhere in
the Americas and Europe. While he argues that these camps and the "death
factories of Eastern Europe" served completely different purposes, Rosenfeld shows
that internment camps in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States nonetheless
employed similar methods: the denial of due process, dehumanization, the
separation and destruction of families, and widely varying degrees and kinds of
abuse, torture, and starvation. He then examines how a cohort of internees
challenged the U.S. military control of the judicial system in Hawai‘i in a
series of legal cases that eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Reaching
across time as well as space, Rosenfeld ties his analysis of these to
strategies for teaching the ways historic and contemporary actors have grappled
with and continue to grapple with the ways nations and citizens and have
maintained and denied civil, legal, and human rights during times of war and
other security crises. Demands by states and their citizens for safeguarding
civil liberties while increasing security during such times was and remains an
uneven process that disproportionately targeted and targets immigrants,
religious and racial minorities, and others on the margins of society and led
and leads to the denial of their civil, legal, and human rights.

In
terms of pedagogy, the articles in this forum offer teachers innovative ideas
and strategies for teaching Hawai‘i in world history. It is as fortuitous as it
is fortunate that these articles can be taught individually or, because of the
common questions addressed by Cook and Kamehiro, on the one hand, and Rosenfeld
and Romney, on the other hand, taught in pairs. In different but complementary
ways, the essays of Kamehiro and Cook, as Cook explicitly states, will help
teachers and students understanding the multiplicity of meanings and practices
of nineteenth-century nationalism and nationhood and what these meant to
Hawaiians and other Native peoples. Both offer analyses and strategies teacher
can use to locate the diplomatic, cultural, genealogical, and political roots
of anti-colonial nationalisms in the nineteenth century and in nations that at
once opposed Western colonialism and were recognized as allies and members of
the world family of nations by that family's most powerful and expansionist
members. Broadening not only our temporal but also our spatial scope, Cook and
Kamehiro offer teachers provocative examples of the centrality of the peoples
and nations of Oceania and the Pacific, not only the "self-strengthening"
movements of nations like Hawai‘i, Japan, Siam, and others but of the
internationalist roots and agendas of anti-colonial nationalisms and of Native
struggles for national sovereignty.

Romney
and Rosenfeld also offer teachers a wealth of analyses and strategies for
teaching Hawai‘i in comparative and world history and for exploring the entangled
relationships between historic and contemporary beliefs about the rights and
responsibilities of national and global citizens and citizenship. While Romney
offers teachers tools for comparing U.S. and European imperial legal regimes at
the broad turn-of-the-twentieth century and Rosenfeld, for comparing state-run
wartime camps and legal challenges to state security and incarceration programs
during World War II, both offer compelling examples of how nation- and
empire-states employed a politics of difference, here especially of civilizational,
racial, and religious difference, as a basis on which to extend and deny legal
rights and protections. Both moreover, offer concrete cases and examples
teachers can use to highlight the centrality of ordinary and marginalized
peoples in Hawai‘i and around the world in the advance and defense of a body of
civil, legal, and human rights widely regarded as universal. Thus, all four
authors and essays in this forum provide productive and provocative methods and
models for teaching Hawai‘i in world history that should inspire teachers and
students at all levels of instruction.

Christine Skwiot is an Associate Professor
of U.S. transnational and world history at Georgia State University. She is the
author of The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and
Hawai‘i (Philadelphia, 2010). Her email address is cskwiot@gsu.edu.

Notes

1 Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The
Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010),
7-13; Gary Y. Okihiro, Island World: A History of Hawai‘i and the
United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 45-48;
Geoffrey Irwin, "Voyaging and Settlement," in K.R. Howe, ed., Vaka Moana,
Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 54-99.

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